The irony in environmental news

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“There is no doubt that the rate at which species are dying out is very high, and we could well be in for a “Big Sixth” mass extinction. … [Yet] the current rate at which new animals and plants (such as the apple fly, the Italian sparrow and Oxford ragwort) are coming into existence is unusually high – and it may be the highest ever. We are already on the verge of Genesis Number Six – a million or so years from now, the world could end up supporting more species, not fewer, as a consequence of the evolution of Homo sapiens.” https://theconversation.com/the-sixth-mass-genesis-new-species-are-coming-into-existence-faster-than-ever-thanks-to-humans-80527

…but possibly minus Homo sapiens. Who’s next for Presidency of the planet?

Could you fly a little faster, said the sparrow to the quail,
There’s a partridge right behind me who’s a deadweight on my tail.
We’re flying round in circles, answered quail unto the spug,
I’m feeling rather queasy and my head’s all shot to fug.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; give him a trawler and he’ll feed his family on caviar wrapped in gold leaf for three decades before leaving the ecological bomb crater for someone else to sort out.

“Trump says in a video on his campaign website, ‘It will be a great wall. It will do what it is supposed to do: keep illegal immigrants out.’ …
Far from being a barren wasteland, the US–Mexico borderlands have some of the highest diversity of mammals, birds and plants in the continental United States and northern Mexico — including many threatened species.
A wall could divide species that make a home in both nations. Bighorn sheep, for example…
Birds that rarely fly, such as roadrunners, or those that swoop low to the ground, such as pygmy owls, could also have trouble surmounting the wall.” (http://www.nature.com/news/trump-s-border-wall-pledge-threatens-delicate-desert-ecosystems-1.20431)

But for sure Trump also has a plan for all the ‘wall-kill’. “Short on detail”, long on sheep.

“As populations of larger mammal species like tapirs and monkeys decline due to hunting, the carbon content of the forest goes down.
Large mammal species play a vital role in dispersing large-seeded trees associated with high wood density. … Dense-wooded, large-seeded Amazonian tree species are replaced by light-wooded trees that produce smaller seeds, which continue to be dispersed in overhunted forests by more resilient smaller mammal and bird species.” (http://news.mongabay.com/2016/01/over-huntings-surprising-connection-to-global-warming/)

“These toxic chemicals [neonicotinoids] not only harm bees, they also persist in the agricultural landscape and contaminate soils, potentially harming invertebrates such as earthworms. They are picked up by wildflowers, get into the watercourse and are linked to a decline in birds and butterflies in farmed systems.
We now know that bumblebees can’t pollinate crops effectively when exposed to these pesticides, so it makes moral, ecological and economic sense to ban them.” (http://scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk/article/call-to-ban-bee-harming-pesticides-in-scotland/)

What else are we going to do with 15 beezillion unemployed bumblebees?

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